Inline skating – shin splint!

I’m starting to do some inline skating, and I’m getting shin-splint! 30 minute of blading and those muscle next to the shin is just burnin’

So what is shin splint?

According to Wikipedia:

Medial tibial stress syndrome, tibial periostitis or shin splints is a common injury that affects athletes who engage in running sports or physical activities such as cross country, marching band, football, or hiking. This condition is characterized by pain in the lower part of the leg between the knee and the ankle. MTSS injuries are caused by repeated trauma to the connective muscle tissue surrounding the tibia. Ignoring this injury may result in a more serious condition such as a stress fracture of the bones. [Wikipedia]

Basically, I think it’s caused by the fact that my Tibialis Anterior (let’s just call this the outer shin muscle) not getting enough work out, and I’m overworking it – because I notice that this is one of the muscles that always burns out after about 30 minute of rollerblading.

Shin Split Cure

Apparently there are no “cure” for Shin Split, as it is not a sickness or illness. It’s simple your muscle getting overworked. So the trick is to do more exercise that work those muscle (when you are not running or blading) – kinda make sense isn’t it, by building more endurance into the muscle, it’ll be able to withstand more stress and so it won’t get overworked and burn out.

So what exercise works? So I went and look up this “Ankle dorsiflexion” thing – which is the movement that basically exercise the muscle – for convenience I’ve linked the image from the Physio Advisor page below (without permission – yikes):

And a quick youtube on shin splint & ankle dorsiflexion land me on a few vids to do the exercise. After trying a few, I settled on this one.

Which is very simple and effective – also I also take in protein shakes to help recover the muscle. The idea is to tell your body that those muscle now needs to work so they need to shape up. Guess what, the next day I can blade for 1 hr and 30 minute with no shin splint pain. So I guess this works (for me, at least).

(update) two days later I didnt do enough exercise and went blading – also didnt drink myprotein shake. The splint is back. I guess you have to keep up these things almost on a daily basis, until your shin muscles are fully functioning again…

So in summary, what I think worked was:

A lot of stretching prior to my blade run

30 min prior, drink protein shake

When not blading, do the above exercise, just work that shin muscle and tell your body to shape it up